[Cryptography] Snowden "fabricated digital keys" to get access to NSA servers?

[Florian Weimer]

* John Gilmore:

> [John here.  Let's try some speculation about what this phrase,
> "fabricating digital keys", might mean.]

Most likely, as part of his job at the contractor, he had
administrator access to a system which was used for key management,
perhaps to apply security updates, manage backups or fix the
occasional glitch.  This is precisely the kind of low-level grunt work
that I expect is outsourced to contractors.

It's also possible that he was directly charged with key management.
I can image that someone thought that as long as some agency committee
made the actual decisions, it was fine to hire an external data typist
who entered the committee decision in to the key management system.

It's really funny that "NSA-level security" has now turned pejorative.